IndeeHub: Paying Filmmakers by the Second

IndeeHub was founded by Zack Mahoney, who has spent half his career in front of the camera as an actor and the other half behind it as a producer, director, and editor. For Zack, the problem with streaming was how it pays filmmakers. Subscriptions pool the audience's money into one flat fee, and the link between views and remuneration for the creator is lost along the way.

IndeeHub is a streaming platform for independent films. It's in open beta with award-winning titles including Dirty Coin, The Ataxian, and Hummingbird. Filmmakers upload their work listing the cast and crew, synopsis and subtitles, without surrendering their rights or promising exclusivity, and they can track views and earnings from their own dashboards. Viewers browse, rent without a membership, build libraries, and follow the artists they like.

The fundamental rule of the IndeeHub model is that filmmakers are paid for every second their films are watched.

IndeeHub wanted the money to move directly from the viewer's wallet to the filmmaker's with no intermediary skimming in between. This is the fairest business model for creators, but it undermines the conventional fintech playbook.

Credit cards charge a base fee on every transaction. A standard online card payment through Stripe costs 2.9% plus a 30-cent base fee, while a second of streaming is worth just a fraction of a cent. IndeeHub's first prototype ran on Interledger, which proved too complex with little chance of adoption, and the crypto alternatives added more complexity still. The wallets IndeeHub had tried required Zack to hold users' keys on his own servers, making his streaming platform a money transmitter with all the risk and regulation that brings.

Zack wanted to revolutionize the monetization of streaming, but old money wanted to keep the subscription model and its misaligned incentives.

IndeeHub integrated the Breez SDK directly into the platform, so monetization works in the app without recourse to third-party workarounds. Every account now comes with its own non-custodial wallet, and users' keys are stored on users' devices, off IndeeHub's servers. Creators can stream their video to users as users stream money back to the creators, and the mechanics are invisible to everyone except the engineering team.

IndeeHub's tech lead Dante integrated the Breez SDK on his own in about a month. The Interledger prototype he tried first stalled on complexity. This time, payments were the fast part: Zack's AI-assisted reconstruction of the front end took twice as long as making the money flow. He expected the integration to be easy. It was easier.

There is no wallet infrastructure to run, no user keys on IndeeHub's servers, no channels, no nodes, and no liquidity to manage.

Every viewer gets a wallet when they sign up, so every account can pay from the first second of viewing. Filmmakers are paid directly according to how many seconds their content is streamed, with no subscription pool deciding their share.

It's art judged — and paid — on its merits. Finally.